Gangsta War

Young fighters take their lead from American pop culture.

From my balcony on the eighth floor of the Hôtel Ivoire, I could see downtown Abidjan across the lagoon in the mist. Skyscrapers rose along the waterfront, a blue neon sign blinked “nissan,” and the plate glass of the commercial banks reflected the silver afternoon light. At this distance, it was easy to pretend that these skyscrapers weren’t emptying out; that the African Development Bank hadn’t abandoned the city; that the shipping traffic at the port, on which all West Africa depended for an economic pulse, hadn’t dropped by fifty per cent. From the balcony, it still looked like the glamorous capital of twenty years ago, before decline and civil war, when young men and women from all over French-speaking Africa came to Abidjan to seek their future in the city of success.

I was living in a small village in Togo then, two countries east of Ivory Coast; in the evenings, I would listen to the mother of the family in my compound describe the time she had spent in Abidjan as a kind of dream. There was abundant work in Ivory Coast, and foreigners like her were thrilled to find themselves in a truly cosmopolitan city, one where everyone spoke the same Abidjanaise French. The ambitious students in the village school where I taught knew that, short of Paris, Abidjan was the best place to be. An African privileged class of bureaucrats and professionals ate in fine restaurants downtown and kept the night clubs open till all hours. A robust economy based on coffee and cocoa exports employed several million African immigrants to do the manual labor and forty thousand French expatriates to run businesses and advise the government. The French, some of them third- or fourth-generation, enjoyed a slightly updated version of the colonial life. In the eighties, a French teen-ager in Abidjan could celebrate his birthday by racing his moped around town and then jumping off a bridge into the lagoon, to the cheers of an Ivorian crowd. The French who have remained in Abidjan now call that time la belle époque.

In Togo, I was a Peace Corps volunteer, living in a village without electricity, and one detail I learned about Abidjan struck me as miraculous. The Hôtel Ivoire, I was told, had a large skating rink with ice that kept a perfectly glazed surface even when the temperature outside topped a hundred degrees. The capital also had world-class golf courses, because President Félix Houphouët-Boigny, the relatively benign dictator who had led Ivory Coast since its nominal independence from France, in 1960, considered the sport to be a mark of civilization. He had turned his home village of Yamoussoukro, a hundred and twenty-five miles north of Abidjan, into a grand political capital of wide boulevards lined with street lamps. He built a Catholic basilica there that rises out of the palm forests like a hallucination of St. Peter’s, of which it is an actual-size replica. He also erected a vast Presidential palace, and surrounded it with man-made lakes that were filled with crocodiles. (Houphouët-Boigny, who died in 1993, is buried in a mausoleum near the cathedral.) While the rest of the region was becoming mired in coups and wars and deepening poverty, social scientists talked about the “Ivorian miracle.” The country was one of the most prosperous in Africa, and Ivorians weren’t killing one another. The residents of Abidjan said that their country was “blessed by the gods.”

As soon as I went down to the hotel’s lobby, my vision of old Abidjan began to fade. The skating rink, on the grounds behind the hotel, was closed. An artificial lake that once was dotted with paddleboats had been drained because of chronic scum, and blue paint was peeling off its concrete walls. In the restaurant, a Liberian lounge singer was belting out “Yesterday” and the theme from “Fame” for a handful of lonely white mercenaries and West African peacekeepers and their prostitutes; she had the desperate brio of a resort performer in the off-season. I hailed a taxi, and as I sat in back, listening to my driver—who was garrulous with rage, like most men in Abidjan—complain about the traffic, the heat, the economy, the government death squads, and the ongoing civil war, it was hard to believe that the ovens of the Pâtisserie Abidjanaise, across the Charles de Gaulle Bridge, were still disgorging sheets of warm, perfect baguettes. But so they were.

Abidjan valiantly clings to the idea that it remains the refined city it was twenty years ago. The University of Abidjan, once an impressive institution, now decrepit, continues to turn out thousands of graduates every term for government jobs or foreign scholarships that no longer exist. In the nineties, the French began to restrict immigration and opportunities to study abroad, just after a catastrophic drop in commodity prices plunged Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer, into deep debt. Today, Abidjan is populated with educated young men and women who have no outlet for their ambitions. “All the generations until 1985 found work—state work, private work,” Ousmane Dembelé, a social geographer at the university, told me. “All goals were satisfied. But after ’85, ’90, ’95, all these generations of youth in Abidjan could find nothing. Nothing.”

These days, Abidjan looks less like Paris and more like a decaying Third World city. Residents encounter symptoms of decline on every street, from collapsing infrastructure to violent crime. “It’s not Lagos yet,” the financial manager of an architecture firm told me. “But we’re headed straight there.”

The northern part of Ivory Coast is largely Muslim, and poorer than the mostly Christian south, with its cocoa plantations and Abidjan. On September 19, 2002, rebel soldiers from the north mutinied against the government. The civil war has regional, religious, and economic dimensions, but its basic cause is political. The mutiny was a violent reaction to several years of anti-northern and anti-immigrant policies pursued by the series of southern Presidents who succeeded Houphouët-Boigny. During the 2000 election, the Presidential candidate from the north, a former International Monetary Fund official named Alassane Ouattara, was disqualified on the dubious ground that he was not of Ivorian parentage. The winner, a history professor named Laurent Gbagbo, from the cocoa region, took office amid riots, during which his supporters killed hundreds of Ouattara’s primarily Muslim followers. Since the civil war broke out, at least three thousand people have been killed and more than a million have been displaced from their homes. Throughout the conflict, one of the government’s favored weapons has been the rhetoric of xenophobia.

The taxi was taking me to a rally of Ivory Coast’s Young Patriots, a coterie of young men paid by the government to stir up nationalistic feelings against the rebels, who, soon after starting the civil war, occupied the north of the country. The Young Patriots railed with equal intensity against immigrants, blaming them for the country’s soaring unemployment rate.

At the Young Patriots’ rally, I wanted to get a glimpse of their leader, Charles Blé Goudé. The drive to the rally took me near the Place de la République, a public square of cracked concrete, where, in late January, Blé Goudé had spoken to tens of thousands, denouncing the French government for failing to rescue Ivory Coast from the rebels. (France, refusing to take sides, had pushed Gbagbo’s government to reconcile with the insurgent forces.) The iconography of those demonstrations was remarkable. It was virulently anti-French and desperately pro-American. “u.s.a. we need you against the ‘old europe,’ ” one sign pleaded, just a few days after Donald Rumsfeld coined the term. Blé Goudé waved an American flag and delighted the crowd by refusing to speak French. “Are you ready for English?” he yelled, and the crowd roared as he spoke a few clumsy sentences in the tongue of the superpower, which, in Ivory Coast, is the language of youthful resistance. The January demonstrations had led to anti-French riots, and thousands of French expatriates fled the country while young Ivorians spat upon them, attacked their businesses and schools, and tried to block the departure of Air France jets from the airport.

The rally this afternoon was in a slum called Port-Bouët, on a waterfront strip near the airport. My driver got lost in Port-Bouët’s labyrinthine streets, which were choked with the blue taxis known as woro-woro. About fifteen years ago, the city government of Paris sent Abidjan a fleet of used green-and-white municipal buses, which grew filthy, broke down, and were never replaced or repaired, even as the city’s population exploded. The woro-woro run local routes to fill in the gaps, but their drivers are notoriously reckless. We passed clogged roads, shantytowns, and entire neighborhoods without decent water, power, or sewage systems.

The taxi turned a corner, and suddenly there were hundreds of people crowding around the perimeter of a dirt rectangle the size of a football field. This was Place Laurent Gbagbo.

Port-Bouët is a government stronghold. High-rise housing projects in advanced states of decay ringed the field, and residents hung out from the windows, their arms dangling beside their laundry. A young m.c. was warming up the crowd with a call-and-response that always ended in the word bête, or “stupid.” The rebels who held the northern half of the country were bête. The neighboring countries suspected of arming them, Burkina Faso and Liberia, were bête. The immigrants in Abidjan with Muslim names, who supposedly sympathized and even conspired with the rebels, were bête. And the French, who had failed to defend their Ivorian brothers and sisters in the hour of crisis—the French were more bête than anyone.

For all the hostility in the slogans, the crowd was cheerful, like spectators awaiting the main act of a show they’d seen before. Almost everyone in the crowd was young; most of them clearly had nothing better to do. Boy venders were selling hats in the national colors, orange and green, with the warning “Don’t Touch Our Country” and T-shirts declaring “Xenophobe—So What?”

In the front row of a tented seating area were the Young Patriot leaders, local stars in their twenties who were dressed like American hip-hop singers: gold chains, tracksuits, floppy hats. Their scowling bodyguards sat behind them, wearing muscle shirts and mirror glasses; a few were armed with Kalashnikov rifles. Sitting quietly and pathetically in the back rows were the neighborhood elders. In the traditional hierarchy of African villages, the old are elaborately deferred to by the young. Here the elders had no role other than to applaud while the Young Patriots took turns swaggering and jigging out on the speaker’s platform and the loudspeakers blasted reggae or zouglou, the homegrown pop music of the movement. A favorite anthem, by a zouglou group called the Bastards, was ‘‘Sacrificed Generation’’:

They say students make too much trouble

They say students go on strike too much

At the start they took away ourscholarships

They made us pay for rooms and meal tickets

Students are poor . . .

When we present our demands

They answer us with tear gas . . .

The big brothers are angry

The old fathers don’t want to get out ofthe way!

Each speaker tried to outdo the last in scabrous wit and extremist views, before boogying back to the tent to touch fists with the others, like an N.B.A. star returning to the bench. At another Young Patriot event, I had heard a heavyset demagogue pronounce the true “axis of evil” to be Liberia, Burkina Faso, and France, and then declare, with malicious irony, “Yeah, I’m Jean-Marie Le Pen!’’ Meanwhile, at night, immigrants were being hounded from their homes under the pretext that they were supporting the rebels, entire shantytowns had been bulldozed, and the corpses of opposition politicians were turning up at dawn in remote corners of the city. Everyone knew that paramilitary death squads were at work, though no one could prove the rumor that they were directed by the President’s wife, Simone, an evangelical Christian with a taste for inflammatory rhetoric against Muslims, immigrants, and whites.

This spring, President Gbagbo, under pressure from France, agreed to include rebel ministers in a new cabinet. In July, the civil war was declared to be over. But late last month rebels started boycotting meetings of the unity government, and threatened to resume the war. This was fine with the leaders of the Young Patriots, who had thrived during the civil war, making regular appearances on television; many had become national celebrities. These young men have no desire to return to the ranks of the eternal students and the jobless street-corner orators.

Blé Goudé arrived very late, in a convoy. “They’re coming! They’re coming! I see Charles!” the m.c. informed the crowd. By the time Blé Goudé, his figure lean and tense, made his way with an armed bodyguard to the tent, and then out across the open dirt to the speaker’s stand, the moon was rising over Port-Bouët.

Blé Goudé, the son of a peasant from President Gbagbo’s region, rose to prominence in the nineties, when he became a leader of the national student movement. The group clashed frequently with police during the chaotic years following Houphouët-Boigny’s death, and Blé Goudé was sent to prison many times. At the end of that decade, when the student movement split into two factions, the university campus became the scene of a small war. Blé Goudé, whose side won, earned the nickname Machete. (He never received a degree, however, though for years he pretended that he had.) The leader of the losing side was Guillaume Soro, an overweight, soft-spoken student from the north. Soro is now the political leader of a major rebel group, the Patriotic Movement of Ivory Coast. The country’s destiny is being shaped by former students who have never held a job.

Blé Goudé took the speaker’s platform. He was wearing baggy green army pants, a tank top, an Adidas pullover tied around his waist, and a black baseball cap with the bill turned up—the imitation-gangsta style of the Young Patriots. But he didn’t strut; his hungry, liquid eyes and knowing smile projected the self-containment of a leader. As he spoke, darkness fell, and gradually he became a disembodied voice. He didn’t shout, unlike the others; his was a deep, calm voice.

Blé Goudé denied press reports that he was getting rich off his leadership of the Young Patriot movement. “They don’t understand that some people fight for their beliefs,’’ he said. ‘‘They think everyone can be bought. They say my belly is getting bigger.” Shrieks of laughter rose from the crowd as he patted his flat stomach. “All this stuff about xenophobia and exclusion is just a cover,” he said. “The Ivorian youth is showing the whole world its attachment to democratic principles. I’m not just talking about the Ivory Coast of today. I’m talking about the generation that will rule Ivory Coast. Because the little kids of ten or eight all say France is no good.”

Other Young Patriots had been funnier and nastier. But when Blé Goudé finished speaking and the music started up, the crowd swarmed around him. For a moment, he had actually made them feel that the future was theirs.

The Young Patriots represent a new kind of African success story. They’re celebrated by many young people in Abidjan for beating and cheating a system gone rancid. With the corrupt “old fathers” refusing to get out of the way, and with all the old channels to success—emigration, foreign study, state employment, family connections—blocked, the new hero is a young trickster with a talent for self-promotion. The model is no longer the formal bureaucratic style of the French colonizer; it’s the loud, unrestrained style that everyone in Ivory Coast calls American.

When Blé Goudé drives around Abidjan in his armed two-car convoy—Renault in front, four-by-four behind—he’s saluted as “the General of the Youth.” According to one well-connected Frenchman I spoke with, the government, at the height of the demonstrations in January, was giving Blé Goudé eighty thousand dollars a week to distribute to his fellow Young Patriots and their crowds of followers. I was told by a Western diplomat that he runs a Mob-style racket in the campus dorms, taking a cut off the illegal lodging of students, who sleep two to a cot or on the floor. Blé Goudé has become a sort of urban warlord.

He hasn’t completely grown into his success, however. When I sat down to talk with him over lunch, it was in his mother’s underfurnished cinder-block house, across a rutted dirt road from a small shantytown. Blé Goudé was wearing gray socks monogrammed with his initials, “CBG” (a friend had made him ten pairs), and, along with half a dozen hangers-on, he was eating the peasant dish of rice and sauce.

“Our elders deceived us,” he told me. “Our predecessors, the political leaders and others, have shown us clearly that our future doesn’t matter. That’s why I’ve organized the Ivorian youth. To give it a political arm.”

Blé Goudé says he is thirty-one; others claim he is older. In his mother’s living room, without the charmer’s smile I had seen in Port-Bouët, he looked hard-featured and edgy. He said that he was tired from his work, but he mustered the energy to urge an American intervention in his country along the lines of the Iraq invasion—a request that his followers had presented to an American official outside the United States Embassy. Blé Goudé hoped to exploit the Franco-American rift over Iraq, and he explained that Ivory Coast’s struggle was the same as America’s: for democracy and against terrorism. The rebellion of September 19, 2002, splintered Ivory Coast, and to him the connection with 9/11 was obvious. “There’s only eight days’ difference,” he pointed out.

I asked whether he thought Americans even knew what was going on in Ivory Coast. He didn’t respond, but it was clear that the youth of Ivory Coast thought they knew what was going on in America.

“Even if the United States didn’t colonize our country, they should come to our assistance,’’ he said. ‘‘Ivory Coast is a land to be taken. Above all, the generation today has been educated in the American spirit. The American spirit is freedom. The American spirit is integrity in action.” Blé Goudé extended his arm in front of him. “When the U.S. says what they’ll do, they do it. They don’t say one thing at night and the opposite the next day, like the French.” It was just as true, he said, of the American celebrities worshipped in Ivory Coast, like Mike Tyson and Jay-Z. “Boxing has no tricks in it. When someone hits you, he hits you. Basketball—it’s all straight up and down. Rap comes out of the ghetto, to convey the suffering of the young people there. When they sing, you listen, and the message comes straight at you.”

In the eyes of Blé Goudé and the Young Patriots, Amadou Guindo is the enemy. Guindo, an immigrant’s son, lives in Koumassi, another Abidjan slum, separated from Port-Bouët by a land bridge across the lagoon. It smells of oranges and sewage. Because there is a high concentration of northerners and foreigners in Koumassi, the government regards it as a hotbed of rebel sympathy. One morning, a month after the war began, several gendarmes stormed down an alleyway, entered a cinder-block compound where the landlady was washing clothes, and broke down Guindo’s door. (He happened to be out.) The landlady convinced the gendarmes that it was a case of mistaken identity, but not before they had rifled through all his belongings.

Guindo, thirty-three years old and unemployed, is known as Cool B, for Cool Boy. On the wall above his bed hung a large American flag; overhead, taped to the low ceiling panels, were posters for B movies like “War Dog” and “The Arrival.” A Richard Wright novel was on his bedside table, next to CDs by Stevie Wonder and R. Kelly. Outdoors, when he cruised the crowded dirt roads of the neighborhood he calls mon ghetto, where someone yelled out his name every few yards and the teen-age prostitutes approached to flirt and the guys sitting in doorways exchanged fist-to-chest salutations with him, Cool B, his head shaved and his eyes concealed behind a pair of Ray-Bans, carried himself in a manner that he called “the American style.” It bore a close resemblance to the style of the young men on the other side of the conflict. Cool B told me that ninety per cent of the young people in Abidjan imitate the American style, which he defined as “total independence. Liberty to express yourself. Economic independence, too. A way of talking and walking.” And he demonstrated by sauntering up the road with a novel combination of the pimp roll and the keep-on-truckin’ stride.

Though he has spent his entire life in Ivory Coast, Cool B is technically a citizen of Mali, to the north, where his father comes from. This is how he acquired Malian citizenship: One night in 1996, Cool B was walking through his ghetto in the company of his German girlfriend, Petra, when a group of policemen approached and demanded his papers. He produced his Ivorian identity card (his father had had him naturalized when he was sixteen), but this only enraged the police. “Amadou Guindo,” one of them said, seeing that the name was foreign. “What name is that?”

“It’s my name.”

The police pocketed Cool B’s card and told him to come with them to the station. When he asked why, they fell on him and handcuffed him. His white girlfriend’s presence seemed to provoke them to ridicule, Cool B recalled. “I said, ‘It’s because of my name you arrest me, you humiliate me. O.K., you don’t have to be Ivorian to be happy in life. Go shit with my card, I don’t give a fuck. From now on, I’ll keep the nationality of my parents.’ ” Instead of going to the police station to ask for his card back and suffer more abuse, he took citizenship from the Malian Embassy. “I’m proud of it,” he said. “I know nothing of Mali. But if I try to get Ivorian nationality they’ll humiliate me every time.”

Cool B speaks with a slight stutter, and as he told me this story, in the privacy of his sweltering ten-foot-square room, the stutter grew more pronounced, his crossed leg jiggled, and the lines deepened in his face, which, with the Ray-Bans off, looked older than his years. Stripped of the American style, he seemed vulnerable, as if he were trying to ward off disappointment.

In 1996, the same year Cool B became a ‘‘foreigner,’’ a new word emerged on the political scene in Abidjan: ivoirité. The English equivalent that best captures the word’s absurdity might be “Ivoryness.” In practice, ivoirité meant that immigrants were subjected to harassment and shakedowns and restrictive new laws. Ivorians from the north, who tend to share family names and the Muslim faith with immigrants from Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso, came in for similar treatment. If a single word can be said to have started a war, ivoirité started Ivory Coast’s.

Cool B’s father worked as a nurse in Abidjan for thirty years before retiring and returning to Mali, in 1991. Cool B didn’t go beyond high school—instead, he pursued an early career in what he calls voyousie, or the hoodlum life. The scale of his activities was small, but he made it a habit to insult pretty much everyone who crossed his path. “The troublemaker doesn’t know why he makes trouble,” he said. “He’s just proud of himself. He has a certain pride.’’ One day in 1990, when Cool B was in high school, a Frenchman came to his drawing class and asked the students to do illustrations showing the proper use of condoms. Cool B found the assignment foolish, and at the end of the class he stood in the doorway to block the Frenchman’s exit.

“You’re going around the world showing people pictures of how to use condoms?” Cool B asked mockingly. “I’ll show you what to do.” He snatched away the man’s prospectus and, reading from the text, improvised an anti-aids rap on the spot in the manner of LL Cool J.

The Frenchman was impressed. Within a couple of days, he had arranged for Cool B to record the rap at a downtown night club, and the song made him a momentary celebrity among Abidjan youth. It also began his long association with white people—among them Petra, his girlfriend, who eventually went back to Germany, and Eliane de Latour, a French filmmaker who employed him for a while as a researcher on a feature about Abidjan youth. Cool B keeps pictures of them on his wall, and he tries to figure out why, in spite of these connections, he remains stuck in Koumassi. He spends his ample free time and his limited funds at a local Internet café, surfing international dating sites and chat rooms where people he knows have found marriage opportunities that got them out of Africa. Or he visits a green-card lottery Web site. His ambition, short of leaving Africa, is to open his own Internet café.

“I don’t understand my situation,” he said. “I’m still blocked. I want to get out of my problems one day. I don’t have the totality of independence.” Cool B’s residence permit expired last year, making him an illegal alien in the only country in which he has ever lived.

When the room grew too hot for us to stay inside, even with a fan blowing, we went around the corner to pay a visit to Cool B’s gang. A dozen young men were seated on facing benches under a ramshackle tin roof; they spent twelve hours a day there, like a conclave of village elders, except that Cool B was the oldest person in the group. The others regarded him with respect and sought his advice. They were all immigrants or northerners, keeping an eye out for the police. They wore gold chains, tank tops, and Nike caps. When I asked what kind of work they did, most of them replied, “Tent rental,” which began to seem like a euphemism for unemployment, though some of them had part-time work fencing stolen goods.

At noon, a communal basin of rice and sauce appeared, and the young men plunged their right hands into it. The gang argot of Abidjan, which combines French, profane English, and the language of Ivory Coast’s north, is called Nushi, or ‘‘mustache,’’ a reference to the way bad guys look in Hollywood movies. The inferior type of rice that Cool B and his friends had to eat is derisively referred to in Nushi as deni kasha, or “lots of children.” The young men all came from poor and enormous polygamous families in which there were as many as thirty-five siblings. “That’s what spoiled our future,’’ a surly fellow with a shaved head told me. ‘‘When our parents worked, they didn’t think of us first. In Europe, they set up an account to help the kids when they grow up, right?”

This was the story they all told: fathers who did nothing for their sons, extended families that might have made sense in a rural village but crushed the life out of them here in the city. Cool B’s closest friend in the group was a rangy twenty-five-year-old, wearing wire-rim glasses, who introduced himself as McKenzie. He’d taken the name from a character in an action movie. Growing up in a northern town called Odienné, McKenzie (whose real name is Morifère Bamba) used to watch American Westerns on a communal TV. John Wayne made a particularly strong impression. These movies lit a desire to live in his “dream country” which remains McKenzie’s sole ambition.

At twelve, he quit school—his mother was dead, his father too poor to support him—and the next year, 1990, he came alone to Abidjan. I asked how he had imagined the city then. “It was the city of success,” McKenzie said. “The city that would give me the ability to realize my dream.” Abidjan was a way station on his escape route to America. This, I thought, was the difference between Cool B’s gang and the Young Patriots: they all copied the American style, but the Young Patriots had found a way to make it work for them in Abidjan.

After a few years in the city of success, McKenzie realized that he was entirely alone. “Succeed how?” he said. “You have to have lots of connections and acquaintances. Guys go into banditry to realize their success.” McKenzie joined a gang, began smoking cocaine, fought, stole, and saw a friend die at the hands of the police. Movies like “Menace II Society,” which seemed to glamorize the gangster life, finally convinced him that it was a dead end. McKenzie left the gang and learned the electrician’s trade, at which he worked irregularly, trying to save money for the trip to America, until the war started and jobs disappeared altogether.

The war was out there somewhere. In Abidjan, a ten-o’clock curfew enforced by gendarmes at roadblocks had shut down night life, but the city was no longer a conflict zone. It was hard to believe that a couple of hundred miles away, in the interior, teen-age militias were machine-gunning children and cutting old men’s throats. Like so many African wars, Ivory Coast’s had degenerated into looting and massacres by bands of loosely controlled, generally underage fighters; it became part of a larger conflict that had been spreading through the region for years—ever since the outbreak of Liberia’s civil war, in 1989—producing hundreds of thousands of corpses and millions of refugees.

Seen from a distance, Africa’s man-made disasters look senseless. But to the participants, who tend to be young and poor, these wars have meaning. The war in Ivory Coast began as a struggle over identity—over the question that haunted Cool B, the question of who gets to be considered Ivorian. The country’s decline made identity a political issue, but it also extends to the larger, almost existential question of what it means to be a young African living in the modern world.

After a week in Abidjan, I drove north, to Bouaké, Ivory Coast’s second-largest city and the main rebel command center. Behind the ceasefire line patrolled by French and West African peacekeeping troops, the town hadn’t seen fighting in months. At rebel headquarters, in a former nursing school, a polite, bored young official was doing a Yahoo search for Uzis and grenades. Out on the half-empty streets, every civilian vehicle had been commandeered, license plates had been removed, doors had been ripped off, and young rebels had painted the sides of the vehicles with Spider-Man logos and self-styled unit names: Delta Force, Highway of Death. Without a war to fight, they were turning into gangsters.

At the hospital, the staff of Doctors Without Borders reported that the most serious injuries were sustained by the young rebels who routinely smashed up cars or accidentally shot themselves in the foot. One night while I was in Bouaké, a notoriously violent young commander named Wattao threw himself a lavish birthday party, with a fawning m.c., cameramen, hundreds of guests who watched themselves live on video screens, and gate-crashers who ended up exchanging gunfire.

The rebel military leadership, which had maintained fairly good discipline since the outbreak of hostilities, was turning to a local priest called Abbé Moïse to rehabilitate the restless underage recruits. “They haven’t killed a lot,” the Abbé told me. “They’re recoverable here. The children of Bouaké aren’t as traumatized as those in the west.”

That was where the real war was taking place. In November, 2002, two new rebel groups had suddenly appeared near the Liberian border. The western groups claimed an alliance with the northern rebels, but they had no clear political motivation, and their rebellion quickly took on the violent, anarchic quality of Liberia’s and Sierra Leone’s civil wars. In fact, some experts have concluded that the western rebellion was the inspiration of Liberia’s President, Charles Taylor, who has had a hand in all the region’s murderous and intertwined wars, organizing and arming rebels in Sierra Leone and Guinea as well as terrorizing his own country for a decade and a half, until his forced departure this past August. Although Taylor is out of power, the widespread instability he fomented won’t dissipate in West Africa anytime soon. The region is now populated with young fighters who float from country to country, looking for war.

The conflict in the west was a catastrophe. Both the rebels and the government were recruiting Liberian mercenaries to do their fighting. The Ivory Coast government also used MI-24 helicopter gunships with Eastern European or South African mercenary crews; the rebels used the feared Sierra Leonean warlord Sam (Mosquito) Bockarie and his battle-hardened teen-age fighters. (Bockarie was killed in Liberia in early May, most likely on the orders of Taylor, against whom he might have testified at the war-crimes court in Sierra Leone, which had indicted him in March.) Hundreds of civilians were being slaughtered in western Ivory Coast, and entire villages had been looted and left empty. It was in the west that the “Ivorian miracle” met its final demise and Ivory Coast became just another West African nightmare.

Before the civil war broke out, the journey from Bouaké to Man, the biggest town in the west, took eight or nine hours. It took me two days, because I had to pass through at least fifty roadblocks. In some places, there was a roadblock every quarter mile. They were makeshift affairs: a tree limb, pieces of junked machinery, concrete blocks. The boys on guard roused themselves from the shade of a tree. When they noticed a white face in the car, they put on angry expressions and went back to grab their AK-47s. Glowering behind sunglasses, they stalked over to the car, fingers on triggers. Around their necks hung leather thongs with polished wooden or stone amulets, which they believed made them bulletproof. Carved fetish figurines stood guard alongside the roadblock. The boys ordered me to open the trunk, they pretended to search inside, they demanded to see my travel permit. A standoff: everything was in order, but they hadn’t given the signal to go, and they had the guns. This last detail made all the difference, yet I found it hard to accept the obvious power relation. Most of them looked the age of the middle-school village boys I had taught twenty years ago in Togo. Those boys had called me Monsieur and left presents of papaya at my door. It was as if I had come back to the region to find all my students armed and snarling, ordering me to get out of the car.

I tried to talk my way through the roadblocks in the old jokey Peace Corps way. And it usually worked: the boys’ faces softened, the barked orders turned into requests for cigarettes or money or aspirin, which were only half serious and then even a bit sheepish, and, as the car started rolling forward, we exchanged a thumbs-up, and a boy began giving me breezy compliments—“If you Americans were here, we’d already be in Abidjan!”—as if the guns had just been props and everything were friendly between us.

The farther west I drove—past the ripe anacard-fruit trees that no one was tending and the storehouses of cotton that couldn’t be sold and the carcasses of vehicles that the rebels had wrecked and abandoned—the less useful my Peace Corps skills became. In Man itself, picturesquely nestled in a ring of steep green mountains with waterfalls, the boys at the roadblocks, drunk or high, muttered about stealing the car. Pickup trucks bristling with Liberians carrying rocket-propelled grenade launchers slalomed wildly through the rebel army’s obstacle courses. The walls of government buildings were bullet-riddled, and the freshly turned mass graves gave off a sharp smell. It was hard to tell who was in charge of Man—the rebel commanders or their underage Ivorian and Liberian recruits, who, according to townspeople, were becoming indistinguishable.

In the middle of town, the young rebels hung out at a maquis, or open-air eatery, called the Tirbo, which smelled of porcupine stew. The youngest I saw, toting his AK-47, was no more than nine. I ordered a plate of rice and looked around. A boy with a red checked kaffiyeh on his head was staring straight ahead, filled with some private rage. Draped around the necks of other boys were leather clubs or sheathed knives or bandoliers. There was no one over thirty in sight.

At midday, a group of four Liberians arrived and sat down at a table. The young men, who propped their weapons between their legs, began making their way through a bottle of Mangoustan’s rum. Their names were Sha, Shala, Johnson, and Romeo. Shala wore an American-flag bandanna, Rambo style. Sha, the most intoxicated of the group, lifted his shirt to show me his wounds.

I asked how much he was paid for his services to the rebels.

“The cause is much more important than pay,” Sha said. “I don’t appreciate pay.”

What was the cause?

“Peace and unity in Africa,” he said.

After the war, Sha said, he wanted to go to New York and become an American marine and learn to fly helicopters and use heavy weapons. “I love America,” he slurred, making an effort to lean forward. “America is my culture.” He waved his glass at the others. “All of them love America.”

Romeo’s glass fell to the floor and shattered. He stared at the fragments without moving. Johnson told the waitress that they would pay for it. Romeo slouched, sunk in a dark mood.

A few months earlier, a recruiter had come to a refugee camp along the Liberian border and persuaded Romeo to join the rebels. There was no better offer on the horizon. “I want something because I don’t want to be suffering, I don’t have nowhere to go,” he said. “Someone say, ‘Take money, go to war. You will not go there? You will go.’ ” He turned his dead-eyed stare on me. “If you can’t pay the young stuff, the war will go all over the world. The war will enter America—let me tell you today. Because you don’t give them money. The man we want to see is bin Laden. We want to see him, to join him. Because he can pay revolutionaries. You think you can get pay for this?” Romeo held up his left calf to show me a bullet wound. “You can’t. Bin Laden can pay it.”

I had seen bin Laden’s face painted on the side of a rebel vehicle. Some fighters wore T-shirts with bin Laden’s face and Bush’s face side by side. In this part of the world, there was no ideological contradiction. Both men stood for power.

At a hospital in a town not far from Man, an Italian doctor named Albert Brizio described the imagery of this war as “a perverse effect of globalization,” adding, “It’s what I call the Liberianization of war.” Brizio had seen the effect in other African countries: young fighters styling themselves after performances, often brutal ones, that they’d seen on TV or in movies. “It allows people to see events or situations they would never have thought of, and they imitate them. These situations have always been contagious, but then you had contagion by contact. Now you have contagion by media.”

But contagion by media can go in both directions, as I discovered when I met a young woman in Man named Jeanette Badouel. She was moving around town in the company of rebels, but, unlike the handful of girl recruits in their ranks, she carried herself with an air of blithe authority and pop stylishness. Jeanette was impossible to miss, decked out in sparkly gold jeans labelled “Pussy” and rolled to the calf, six-inch platform shoes, and a pink frilly blouse; her hair was dyed blond and done in short braids. She shopped for her Liberian-made American-style T-shirts and shoes at Saturday markets along the border, which was one of the most dangerous places on earth. She was born in a village twenty miles south of Man but had been living with her French husband and their children in Rennes, where she directed a nonprofit group called Association Métissage, whose Web site says that it “realizes projects favoring cultural diversity and solidarity among peoples.” When the western rebellion broke out, just as Jeanette was visiting her parents in Man, she refused the French government’s offer of evacuation and decided to set up a rebel television station, using the digital equipment she happened to have brought. Though she claimed to operate free of political interference, it was clear that TV Grand Ouest served up pro-rebel propaganda to the region, if anyone was watching.

I sat in the station’s bug-filled studio with Jeanette and watched programming. There was a traditional dance, performed to express villagers’ happiness with rebel rule, the voice-over explained. There were Eddie Murphy movies. And there was footage of the aftermath of a recent massacre by government and Liberian forces—the hacked and bullet-ridden bodies of peasants lying in houses and on roads just south of Man—with Jeanette conducting breathless interviews.

I had trouble figuring Jeanette out. She loved fashion and reading Paris Match, yet rebel-held Man seemed to suit her fine. The rebellion looked to her like a wonderful example of cultural diversity and solidarity among peoples. It was almost like America. “For me, it’s democracy,” she gushed. “Everyone is here—the Liberians are everywhere. You’ll see a lot on the way to the border. Guineans, Malians. For me, it’s the people.”

Twenty years ago, V. S. Naipaul published an essay in this magazine called “The Crocodiles of Yamoussoukro,” an account of life in Ivory Coast at the height of the “miracle” under Houphouët-Boigny. Toward the end of the piece, Naipaul has a dream: the bridge on which he is standing starts to melt away. The concrete and steel of Abidjan turn out to be perishable. “The new world existed in the minds of other men,’’ he writes. ‘‘Remove those men, and their ideas—which, after all, had no finality—would disappear.”

Naipaul’s prophecy that Ivory Coast would slip back into a primordial past seemed comforting compared with the new reality that was taking hold. Cool B and his gang, and the Young Patriots, and the rebels in the north and the west are severed irrevocably from the traditional sources of meaning—the village, the elders, the extended family—that I found in West Africa two decades ago. Their heroes are American celebrities, local warlords, gangsters, and demagogues. In the cities and the ragtag armies, they live in a society consisting of only the young. Tempted and tormented by images and words from elsewhere, trapped in a money economy with nothing to sell, they have no ready way of realizing their desires. But they can’t go back. To some hardheaded observers in the West, they are “loose molecules,” mindless forces of anarchy or a new primitivism. In fact, the opposite is true: the struggle in Ivory Coast, and perhaps in other parts of Africa, is recognizable as the unlovely effort of individuals to find an identity and a place in a world that has no use for them.

In Abidjan, I spoke with Ruth Marshall-Fratani, a researcher with the French journal Politique Africaine. “The gap between aspirations and possibilities—I think that gap has widened incredibly in the last fifteen years,’’ she said. ‘‘Access to global images has increased it amazingly.” The phrase she borrowed to describe the situation of the young Africans I had met was lèche-vitrines—window-licking. ‘‘It isn’t window-shopping,” she explained. “That means you can go in and buy. This is just licking the window. And, basically, that’s this generation’s experience.” She went on, “Everybody wants to get a part of the action. They have these aspirations and they’re not prepared to give them up. Politics is one way. Religion is another. And war is another.”

On one of my last days in Ivory Coast, I went back to Koumassi to see Cool B. He wanted to introduce me to two young men he knew. Madness and Yul, twenty-six and twenty-three, had both done time in prison and had the razor scars to prove it. Madness, whose real name is Mohamed Bamba, had been on the street since the age of twelve, working as a petty thief and drug dealer. His eyelids were heavy and his voice slow from years of smoking heroin. Yul, born Issouf Traore, hustled stolen pharmaceuticals. Both of them were trying to go straight as barkers at a woro-woro station, snagging passengers for local runs. Cool B, Madness, Yul, and I sat in a maquis and drank Guinness. Madness was stoic; Yul, whose nickname came from his shaved head, grew frantic as he talked. It was the same story I’d heard from the others—a father who hadn’t taken care of him. “He told me, ‘If you come back here I’ll put you in prison again.’ I said, ‘You’re my father, you put me in the world.’ ” What agitated Yul to distraction was the fact that his father had gone back to Mali and died and been buried before they could reconcile. “He died when it still wasn’t O.K. with us. He spoke to me, but I don’t know what was at the bottom of his heart.”

From his trouser pocket Yul withdrew a piece of folded officialdom. It wasn’t proof of citizenship—his father had failed to naturalize him. Nor did Yul have Malian papers. But when his girlfriend gave birth, Yul, who never attended school, needed to establish himself as the legal father. He bribed the police to give him a document stating, falsely, that he had lost his identity card. The document was called a “Certificate of Declaration of Loss.” It wasn’t sufficient to confer his last name on his son, but it was the sum of Yul’s identity in Ivory Coast.

“A man has to have a father at his side to help him. If he doesn’t—” Yul stared at me a bit wildly, his toothy mouth open. “Who’s going to help me? Who? I don’t see.”

Madness said calmly, “If you talk to a thousand youths, there isn’t one who will tell you it’s going O.K. for him.”

I asked Madness and Yul what they imagined Americans thought of them.

“They’ve forgotten us,” Yul said.

“They don’t know what we’re living here in Africa,” Madness said. “Africa is misery. Africa—really—it’s hard, hard, hard. People of good will are interested in us. But there are others, with means, who aren’t interested at all. Because Africa—it’s a continent of hell.” ♦